Part 4: Prune Your Tech Stack As You Grow

Watch the video, or keep reading below.

There are three zero-sum truths about your marketing tech stack:

1. The more tools you use, the higher your cost of doing business
2. The more tools you use, the more complicated your life gets
3. The more non-native tools you integrate with your website, the worse your site performance gets

From an accessibility, performance, and cost standpoint, the fewer tools you're using to achieve your target outcomes, the better. Your goal should be to keep your tech stack as lightweight as possible.

Ecommerce Platforms Are Quietly Consolidating Marketing Tools

Luckily, as ecommerce technology evolves, it's actually consolidating. Klaviyo, for example, began as an email marketing system (EMS) for small businesses. Now it's an enterprise-level tool that handles SMS and markets itself as a CDP. We've covered the basic tools an ecommerce business needs to manage marketing and operations in Part 2: Select The Best Project Management Tools For Your Business, which includes a few we recommend consolidating (like your email and SMS marketing platforms). Realistically though, you're not going to carve out the time for a technology audit unless one of your tools is severely underperforming or creating revenue-blocking issues.

The Passive Strategy: Read Your Platform's Release Notes

There's an easier, more efficient approach to streamlining your tech stack. Rather than periodically auditing your tools and comparing them with what's available on the market, simply wait for your ecommerce platform to release a new version, and review the release notes for new marketing tools.

This is a legitimate passive strategy because the major ecommerce providers win customers by offering more useful features to merchants than their competitors. Since the pandemic, the competition for merchants has only increased, spurring the pace of innovation. At time of writing, the leading platforms have already subsumed many of the marketing capabilities that used to require a third-party app or platform, including:

• Email and SMS marketing
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM) functionality
• Customer Data Platform (CDP) functionality
• Customer service chat
• Modals, popups, and forms

Granted, there's a huge potential difference between using a native marketing feature inside your ecommerce platform and leveraging a dedicated marketing platform designed for power users. But the potential efficiency gains, plus the tantalizing prospect of unifying your data and reporting, make it worthwhile to vet your platform's newly offered marketing tools with your team.

If you're trying to figure out what to keep, what to cut, and what to consolidate in your marketing tech stack, book a free demo using the form on this page and we'll help you cut through the noise.